I Went to Rome a Protestant—and Saw Peter

The papal audience I agreed to “for my wife” changed the way I saw authority, Scripture, and the Church forever.

Yesterday I was talking with a young Protestant man who told me he was heading to Rome.

“Make sure you go to the Vatican,” I said.

He smiled. “Oh, absolutely. The museum, the history, the Sistine Chapel.”

“And if you can,” I added, “go to a papal audience with Pope Leo.”

That’s when he hesitated.

The Vatican? Yes. The pope? Eh… maybe.

I recognized that hesitation immediately because, years ago, I had the exact same reaction.

In 2019, my wife Stephanie and I traveled to Rome for our tenth wedding anniversary. She wanted the Vatican. I wanted Italy—the history, the beauty, and the food.

At the time, I had been Protestant for forty years and still carried what I can only describe as an “anything but Catholic” mentality. I had drifted in and out of faith over the years, but even when I was distant from Christianity, one thing remained strangely intact: my resistance to Rome.

I was happy to tour St. Peter’s Basilica as a historical wonder. The Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel fascinated me. But the papal audience? I agreed mostly to make Stephanie happy.

The day before the audience, after touring the basilica and museum, we were walking through St. Peter’s Square when Stephanie casually said she wanted to see St. Peter’s bones beneath the basilica.

Immediately, my anti-Catholic reflexes flared. The bones? Really? Why the relics? Why the reverence? Why the fixation on a man?

By the next morning, my attitude hadn’t improved. The square was packed. The Roman heat was oppressive. People from every corner of the world crowded shoulder to shoulder, waiting.

Then Pope Francis arrived. He moved slowly through the crowd, blessing children, kissing babies, pausing for the sick and disabled. At first, I processed it the way any Protestant skeptic might: Okay, this is cool. It felt like the kind of excitement you’d have seeing a world-famous actor up close. But then something shifted.

When he reached the front of the square, the cardinals gathered around him. The prayers began—first in one language, then another, then another. Tens of thousands of Christians from around the world stood together, united in prayer. And for the first time in my life, I really saw what the papacy was.

I didn’t see a king.

I didn’t see a celebrity.

I saw an apostle.

I saw Peter.

That moment reached back into years of theological wrestling I had tried to ignore. Like many Protestants, I had always stumbled over Christ’s words in Matthew:

 “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”

I had heard every Protestant explanation. “The rock is Peter’s confession of faith,” or “Jesus meant a pebble, not a rock.”

But the more honestly I studied it, the harder those explanations became to defend.

In Aramaic, Jesus says Kepha—rock. In Greek, it becomes Petros. In either language, Christ is clearly renaming Simon for a purpose. And names from God are never random.

My own last name, Sabo, is Hungarian for tailor. I like to imagine my ancestors hemming the trousers of both aristocrats and commoners. Names tell us something about a person’s role. But when God gives someone a new name, it signals mission.

Abram becomes Abraham.
Jacob becomes Israel.
Saul becomes Paul.

So when Simon becomes Peter, what else could it mean except that Christ was establishing a role—a visible shepherd, an earthly head, the man where the buck stops?

The truth is, the mental dance I had to perform to deny that interpretation sprained many a theological ankle. Once I stopped resisting the plain meaning of the text, the rest of Scripture began to fall into place.

Peter leads in Acts.

Peter speaks decisively at the Council of Jerusalem.

Peter is given the authority to bind and loose, with heaven affirming those decisions.

And once I saw that, the Reformation questions became unavoidable.

I still believe God used Martin Luther to reform corruption in the Church. But reform is not the same thing as re-creation. Where did Luther get the authority to alter the canon of Scripture? Where did Calvin and Zwingli get the right to splinter Christendom further?

The deeper I looked, the clearer it became: Protestantism had inherited pieces of Christian truth, but not the visible authority Christ established. And the evidence is everywhere.

Tens of thousands of denominations.

Endless fragmentation.

New churches forming every time believers disagree.

Is that what Christ meant by one Church? I can’t believe it is.

The deeper issue, I realized, is that human beings do not mind authority in theory—we resist it in practice. We are comfortable saying, “Christ alone is my authority.” But suggest that Christ might exercise His authority through a human office, and something inside us recoils. Why?

Because abstract authority rarely threatens our pride. Human authority does.

If a trusted Christian friend told you to pray more and spend more time in Scripture, you might gladly listen. But if the pope said the exact same thing, why does it suddenly feel uncomfortable?

Because now it requires humility.

Now it requires submission.

Now it asks us to trust that Christ actually intended His Church to be visible, historical, and authoritative—not endlessly reinvented.

That was the real battle for me.

Not history. Not even theology. It was my Pride.

Before I converted to Catholicism, I briefly considered Eastern Orthodoxy, but I couldn’t get around what both Scripture and history seemed to show so plainly: God has always worked through visible headship.

There is always a king.
There is always a high priest.
There is a shepherd.
There is one place where the buck stops.

And standing in St. Peter’s Square, praying the Our Father beside believers from every nation, hearing one prayer rise in countless languages to the same God, I experienced something I still struggle to describe.

I saw the communion of saints.

I saw one Church.

And for the first time, authority didn’t feel oppressive. It felt like peace.